Lynda Partner of Gotmarketing

Ottawa-based e-mail marketing company Gotmarketing Inc. is taking direct aim at spammers.

Gotmarketing recently helped create an anti-spam lobbying organization called the E-mail Service Provider Coalition (ESPC). The organization, which is comprised of 18 other e-mail service providers, is focused on influencing anti-spam legislation and educating people what e-mail technologies can do to regulate their industry internally.

Gotmarketing, the group's Canadian representative, is set to respond to Industry Canada's white paper on e-mail, which was issued late last year. While the issue of spam is hardly new, Gotmarketing's Lynda Partner says the ESPC is taking action to curb its growth since the Internet is still relatively new and legislation has to catch up with the problem.

"Our position is that people who use e-mail for misleading practices should be prosecuted to fullest extent of the law," she says. "It's very difficult to prosecute since laws aren't clear as to what is legal and what is not."

Spam refers to any unsolicited bulk e-mail that is sent to a Web user without his or her permission. Often spam e-mail does not offer its recipients the ability to take their e-mail addresses off the list or respond to the sender.

With the exception of corporate giants Microsoft Corp. and AOL, Partner says she doesn't know of any cases where e-mail spammers are being taken to task for their activities.

Members of the ESPC obviously have a vested interest in attacking the spam problem. Gotmarketing's business model revolves around developing e-mail marketing campaigns for all sorts of companies. The distinction between what Gotmarketing develops and what spammers do is that Gotmarketing obtains the permission of the recipients that its e-mail marketing campaigns target. If spam isn't dealt with in a meaningful way, Partner says people will see e-mail as "an unreliable communications tool."

Partner says she receives between 50 to 60 unsolicited e-mail messages per day, which she attributes to the fact that Gotmarketing's Web address is so prevalent in the company's literature and signage.

Local tech firm Versature Corp. has also recently come out of stealth mode with a software package that is geared toward filtering out spam from of a company's server.

Versature's president Paul Emond says he decided to spin Versature out of IT outsourcing firm Techsupport.ca because he was unable to find a product that addressed the spam problems Techsupport.ca customers experience.

"There will be a time when it will be as prevalent as anti-virus," says Emond. "You'll have anti-virus software and anti-spam."

Versature's product allows its customers to review all the flagged e-mail messages it receives per day and decide which ones that should be permanently blocked.

Partner is a strong proponent of this type of approach to filtering spam. She says the ESPC is working with Internet service providers (ISP) to steer them away from blanket e-mail filtering policies. It is important for ISPs to develop lists of legitimate e-mail marketers, she says, so that their e-mail campaigns don't get caught up in the same dragnet that are set up to nab spam.

— By Michael Hammond